Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
How Fast is Global Warming Happening?
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
When I began writing _A Nation of Farmers_ last year, one of the first sections I completed was the introduction to the agricultural impact of climate change. I finished it in early March, and felt that I’d produced a fairly cutting-edge synthesis of the implications of Global Warming for food and agriculture – and about the power of food and agriculture to mediate global warming. Pleased that I’d written something useful and that at least one chapter of the book was finished, I sent it off to my publisher for their perusal and turned to other things. I could have just saved myself time and shoved it in the recycling bin, deleted it from my hard drive and taken a nap.
It wasn’t that wasn’t carefully researched or written, just that the data on climate change is coming in so fast right now that what I wrote this spring is now largely outdated. There are now further refinements, subsequent studies and new models to deal with. I subscribe to a number of news feeds, and people send me additional studies and items of interest. My husband, an astrophysicist who teaches environmental physics also tracks the same material. And what, overwhelmingly I’m seeing, and most scientists seem to be seeing, is that global warming is progressing far faster than anyone would ever have expected.
For example, as recently as this spring, the IPCC report was estimating that arctic ice might disappear in the summers as early as 2050, but more likely towards the very end of this century. Research by James Hansen and other scientists at NASA projected an ice free arctic as early as 2023 this year, which stunned the scientific community.
(27 September 2007)
The Climate Change Peril That Insurers See
John Morrison and Alex Sink, Washington Post
Montana is burning again. This summer, some of the nation’s worst wildfires incinerated homes, barns and fences, killing livestock and forcing families to evacuate. Wildfires have increased fourfold since the 1980s, and they are bigger and harder to contain because of earlier-arriving springs and hotter, bone-dry summers. Last year’s fires broke records; this year could be worse. As courageous firefighters beat back the flames, insurance companies continue to pay out billions for wildfire losses across the West.
Meanwhile, Florida is bracing for the duration of the hurricane season even as rebuilding continues from the eight hurricanes that crisscrossed the Sunshine State in 2004 and 2005. Storms grow ever more intense: Since the 1970s, the number intensifying to Category 4 or 5 hurricanes has almost doubled, costing insurers tens of billions of dollars.
Montana and Florida are not the only states suffering huge insurance losses from natural disasters. Increasingly destructive weather — including heat waves, hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, hailstorms and drought — accounted for 88 percent of all property losses paid by insurers from 1980 through 2005. Seven of the 10 most expensive catastrophes for the U.S. property and casualty industry happened between 2001 and 2005.
Ten years ago, Peter Levene, chairman of Lloyds of London, was skeptical about global warming theories, but no longer. He believes carbon emissions caused by human activity are warming the Earth and causing severe weather-related events. “At Lloyds, we feel the effects of extreme weather more than most,” he said in a March speech. “We don’t just live with risk — we have to pick up the pieces afterwards.”
(27 September 2007)
Banks Urging U.S. to Adopt the Trading of Emissions
James Kanter, New York Times
PARIS, Sept. 25 — A group representing some of the world’s leading banks will urge the United States and other industrial nations this week to move quickly to introduce a lightly regulated system for trading carbon emissions permits.
Permit-trading systems offer banks a potentially vast new business. For it to grow, leading economies — particularly the United States — will need to set limits on the quantities of greenhouse gases that can be released and to allow companies in other parts of the world to buy emissions permits.
“Where politicians opt to implement carbon constraints, then it should be cap-and-trade,” said Imtiaz Ahmad, head of emissions trading at Morgan Stanley in London and vice president of a lobbying group called International Carbon Investors and Services, which is being created to represent the banks.
The banking companies, which include Citigroup, Lehman Brothers Holdings and Morgan Stanley, are giving strong signs that Wall Street wants Washington to open the way to reduced emissions using a trading system based on the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement the United States did not ratify, rather than by enacting carbon taxes.
(26 September 2007)
World Leaders Press U.S. To Act on Climate Change
Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post
Government officials from around the world flocked to Washington yesterday to press for mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change in anticipation of President Bush’s summit on global warming later this week.
Using unusually blunt language, several high-ranking ministers from abroad, as well as American lawmakers, said the Bush administration’s resistance to a national, economy-wide carbon cap is jeopardizing the world’s ability to address climate change. Administration officials said they hope the talks Thursday and Friday will help the major carbon-emitting nations set a goal for cutting greenhouse gases by the end of 2008, but several foreign climate negotiators said that approach will not avert catastrophic climate change.
(26 September 2007)
Diplomats accuse Bush of attempting to derail UN climate conference
Ewan MacAskill, Guardian
President George Bush was yesterday criticised by diplomats for attempting to derail a UN initiative on climate change by pressing ahead with his own conference, which starts in Washington today.
One European diplomat described the US meeting as a spoiler for a UN conference planned for Bali in December. Another, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, claimed that the US conference was merely a way of deflecting pressure from other world leaders who had asked at the G8 summit this year for the US to make concessions on global warming.
They predicted that Mr Bush, who is to address the meeting tomorrow, will stress the need to make technological advances that can help combat climate change but will reject mandatory caps on emissions.
The British government shares the frustration of other European governments with the lack of urgency on the part of the Bush administration. The British assessment of Mr Bush’s conference is reflected in the level of representation – Phil Woolas, a junior environment minister.
(27 September 2007)
